Sunday, October 27, 2013

Whoah! The previous post turned my train of thought to other 70's, witchy movie-related tunes and of course Donovon's Season of the Witch and its use in George A. Romero's largely unknown classic of the same name sprang to mind. When I popped over to the youtubes to look for said song imagine my surprise when I noticed that the entire freakin' movie was on there! Now, I don't own the rights and as usual I implore you to buy this is if you dig it, but it's up there and a lot of folks don't know about it and it's almost Halloween, so when you get a minute, sit down and thrill to the domestic witchery of a lost Romero gem!!!

My friends Chris and Tori are geniuses at unearthing good metal. It's not their only interests, but there's just a rare knack for curation that has brought me hours and hours of enjoyment. Case in point - about six months ago they burned me a spindle of CD's that I am still making my way through. Today, fresh from a week in Chicago where I hung with them for several days, I popped on another disc from that seemingly endless spindle (a good thing). Black Breath - Heavy Breathing grabbed me from the opening bellow and did not let go. Here's that opener, Black Sin (Spit on the Cross) followed by another track I really dug, Children of the Horn. As per my creed, what I dig I try to buy, so I'm planning ordering both Heavy Breathing (2010) and it's 2012 follow-up Sentenced to Life, both on the always fantastic Southern Lord Records.

Also I can't help but remark that I was not surprised to find that Black Breath are from Washington state. As I fall further and further down my current Laird Barron spiral a lot of disparate elements seem to be aligning across some kind of giant, Washington-flavored pentacle.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

How the hell is this not the biggest band in the world? Seriously, I had never heard of these guys until my good friend Anthony (of Bittersweet & The B-Sides) told me about them yesterday. Said I'd fall in love the second I watched this clip.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Okay, it's obviously going to be a very metal sort of day. Cool, fits with my Midwest, October mindset. So about a week or two back Debemur Morti - possibly the best Black Metal label out there - sends out an email I read and haven't had a chance to get back to since. It was an update on new releases. One of those is the new Blut Aus Nord, What Once Was... Liber III. How does this band continue to put out this amount of great stuff? In '12 we not only had the final part of the 777 trilogy but also the second of the Liber... What Once Was series. And now there's the third Liber and it sounds - as all Nord does - just down right amazing. Follow the link back to theDebemur Morti bandcamp and get the entire digital album or pre-order the vinyl or CD - out Friday the 25th here.

Last weekInvisible Oranges debuted "Gorgon", a new song by Seattle band Sandrider. I missed this, caught it with the Brooklyn Vegan re-post this morning when I woke up hung over and needing something get the sludgified blood of three days of Chicago food - beef sandwiches and pizza and hot dogs and Goose Island beer - moving first thing on a Tuesday. Not only did Gorgon do the trick before I'd even had any coffee, I moved around and found some other tracks that tell me A) this is an album that needs to be purchased IMMEDIATELY for my constant listening pleasure and B) this is going to be big.

Above is Sandrider playing a full set compliments of Seattle'sKEXP - a fantastic radio station that has some great streaming available. However, I strongly recommend hitting either that IO or BV link above and hearing the studio version of Gorgon, along with all other pertinent information about Godhead, due 11/19 on Good to Die Records. Kinda feeling about Sandrider the way I felt about High on Fire and Trailer Hitch the first time I heard them back in the day...

Monday, October 21, 2013

This began with me hitting up my favorite music blog Heavenisanincubator - something I haven't had the time to do in what feels like forever. Anyway, posted up top on the site was a link to Jezzebeam - a gloomy, experimental group I totally loved. This got me thinking of something I'd heard about recently from someone - I opened another window while Jezzebeam played and went to my second favorite music site, Brooklyn Vegan. I'm sitting in Chicago, drinking cup after cup of a really great Earl Grey tea, getting overly caffeinated and dealing with some personal stuff.

Anyway...

BV has a link up to info about the new album coming from Kauan - who like Jezzebeam I know absolutely nothing about. The album artwork grabbed me right away - case in point:

image courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan & Invisible Oranges.com

See? So I open another window and look Kauan up and find next to no additional information save for the originalInvisible Orangesthat the BV article references. Then what follows catches my eye and I'm both chilled and blown away. Perhaps it's all the Laird Barron I've been reading - his newest collection of short stories, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is seriously the best short Horror fiction I've ever read - but while this report borders on the areas of human darkness I usually cannot traffic this is actually making my creativity really come on line. Good thing - about to attempt to pick-up some footage that should help me finish the second video by my long-distance music project The Forest Children. And it's some dark stuff, so this is the raw material to fan those flames.

Night of the Demons. The original. Best line, "I've never done it in a coffin before." This movie rules but it has seemed very had to come by the last few years. The one copy Netflix has is scratched and doesn't play (I've gotten it twice I think, both times unable to finish it). There's a remake that is - of course - unnecessary. This is the pure 80's horror sweet spot - written to be both funny and horrific. Makes a very nice companion piece to Return of the Living Dead, another film featuring arguably the greatest B-movie scream queen, Linnea Quigely. And of course, this is one of the most awesome songs ever recorded.

Claudio Simonetti and the Goblin crew are responsible for some of the greatest horror soundtracks of all time. Goblin surprised everyone by touring this year - first ever North American dates. And available at those gigs? A limited edition vinyl EP wherein they have re-recorded four classic pieces: Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), Roller (Non-ST track), Suspiria and Tenebre. I was unable to obtain tickets to the LA show but my good friends Chris and Tori attended the Chicago show (with Secret Chiefs opening!!!) and grabbed me a copy of the record! So psyched. Thanks guys.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

My love of comics is a very deep and intense thing. I've been reading them since Larry Hama's GIJOE #49 - roughly the summer before I was in fourth grade or ~1986. Not all comics fit my "like" profile of course - I'm somewhat discerning when it comes to the area of tights and capes for instance. However, the beauty of today's comic climate is that the books and writing have matured with the audience and we now find not only amazingly sophisticated story tellers like Grant Morrison, Jonathan Hickman and Brian Michael Bendis writing superhero books for an equally sophisticated audience, but a wide variety of independent books that not only constantly break new ground in the medium itself but seed and influence big-budget Hollywood movies. Once thing I really try to do with my comic column on Joup.co is focus as much as possible on independent books that the Kickstarter platform has made possible in a way that was just never economically feasible before. I've begun to get emails from a lot of indie folks out there and I confess that lately I'm not always able to feature or even - in several unfortunate cases - respond to the creators because all the writing I do - which is at times almost unmanageable - is on top of my day job, which along with commute through LA traffic* eats up a considerable amount of my day. I try to respond to everyone and I'm getting better at it, but honestly I'd not anticipated the amount of interest.

Now, excuses aside...

The indie books I have begun to spotlight have been books like Ugli Studios Presents and Tension that have consisted of undeniably-constructed Kickstarters. Now another has caught my eye and it will be the focus of an upcoming issue of Thee Comic Column. That said I wanted to jump the gun and start getting the word out there as best I can because there are only thirty-six days left, so without further adieu I give you the Kickstarter video for ...RUIN, a post-apocalyptic, sci fi adventure that looks fantastic!

Via Bloody Disgusting (I haven't had time to go to that site in ages and look what I've been missing!). I love the Ginger Snaps movies, especially #2 even though we'll likely never get a continuation of that mind-fuck ending, and so I love Katharine Isabelle. I haven't quite had the time or the guts to watch American Mary yet, and this just looks... awesome but possibly on the outskirts of places I'm no longer really comfortable going with films. Torture porn no but excessive pain and suffering? Maybe. We'll see. I LOVE the concept of torn-off stuffed animal heads as masks though.

Via Metal Sucks. This reminds me very much of Gub-era Pigface at the start, then it just deteriorates into a hellish plasma of primordial anguish. I don't always dig Author & Punisher - that's not quite the correct way to say it. The man's music simply requires a very specific state of mind for me to get into it. But when I get into it, it's like a bottomless pit - one of the only current artists I would consider to be carrying on and adding to the Industrial genre.

See what I mean? I haven't really had any interest in watching the Simpsons in years. I love seasons 3-around 10 or 11, then that's just kind of enough for me personally. The odd episode here and there can be cool, but it's just not something that factors in much. But this... del Toro is just a God.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

First night in a while I've gotten to sit down and flip through the internet for interesting tidbits to post (primarily because I'm blowing off about a half dozen other things I should be doing. This will end the night and give me some time to answer some emails and do a little bit of writing.

And now I find this. Imperial Triumphant's video for Crushing the Idol skirts a line that I become weary to cross, however it does so fairly tastefully, without ever actually crossing it. I'm still suffering my "violence in media" hangover so this is perfect. Kind of Bret Easton Ellis-ish too.

So a big, fun part of the H.P. Lovecraft filmfest is always the shorts. This year we missed a small portion of them, but all of the ones we did see were great. One though stood out above all the rest. Grasshopper! The Movie. Find this WHEREVER you can and watch it, it's that good.

Well-respected Chicago Magazine Milk has gone online and I've got an article on it! I've wanted to do a series of pieces I call "One Song" for some time. The essential idea is I take one song and talk about it in relation to the world around me. First up, Massive Attack's Protection, the dark, brooding title track of the band's 1994 second album of the same name. Read One Song: Protection on Milk here. Then stick around the site and do some more reading. Some marvelous writing therein.